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Authors:Jorge LedoPages: 157 - 160Abstract: The aim of this volume is not to offer a comprehensive overview of the multifarious aspects of fiction and its implications for early modern philosophy, but to be an invitation, from the standpoint of the history of philosophy, to survey some of the fundamental problems of the field, using six case-studies written by some of the finest international scholars in their respective areas of Renaissance studies. Although perhaps not evident at a first reading, these six studies are linked by common concerns such as the theoretical relationship between (literary) history, rhetoric, poetics, and philosophy; the tensions between res, verba, and imago; and the concept of enargeia. They have been arranged according to the chronology of the corpus each one considers.PubDate: 2018-01-05DOI: 10.26754/ojs_arif/a.rif.201722470Issue No:Vol. 4, No. 2 (2018)

Authors:Jorge LedoPages: 163 - 214Abstract: The following pages make a case for the important role played by Aristotle’s Metaphysics α 2 982b11–21 in Renaissance poetics and especially in that of Girolamo Fracastoro. As this passage, and Aristotle’s Metaphysics in general, have traditionally been denied a major role in the poetics of the Renaissance, I have been obliged to develop my argument in three sections. [1.] The first focuses on Thomas Aquinas’s roundbreaking reading of the quotation in psychological and epistemological terms, and on how he and his contemporaries were able to harmonize it both with the corpus Aristotelicum and with the development of a place for poetry in the system of the arts. [2.] The second section illustrates how the first humanists used Aristotle’s authority to invert the meaning of the passage, transforming it into an argument in defense of the primacy of poetry over the rest of the arts. This appropriation had two undesiderable effects: either depriving the passage of its theoretical implications or, worse, assimilating Aristotle’s words into a Platonizing vision of poetry. Only with the recovery of the Greek text of Aristotle’s Poetics in the late fifteenth century did the passage escape its new status as a commonplace in humanist defense of poetry, and was briefly again considered as a point of departure for the analysis of concepts such as fabula (fiction) and admiratio (wonder), based on philosophical, poetic, and medical premises. [3] The last section introduces Galeotto Marzio’s and Giovanni Pontano’s pioneering works on these two concepts—fabula and admiratio—, as an introduction to the subsequent synthesis done by Girolamo Fracastoro, who, from the positions held by Marzio and Pontano as well as Aquinas’s original intuition, was able to harmonize natural philosophy and poetry by means of their psychological implications. This is what I have called here the ‘medical poetics of wonder’ or, more simply, mythotherapy. PubDate: 2018-01-05DOI: 10.26754/ojs_arif/a.rif.201722472Issue No:Vol. 4, No. 2 (2018)

Authors:Guido GiglioniPages: 215 - 241Abstract: By concentrating on the work of Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), this article explores the questions about whether and to what extent fictional accounts of reality may contribute to the crafting of rational arguments. I will present Poliziano’s contribution to this debate as deeply embedded in a culture of verbal and visual mediation, as was characteristic of Renaissance philosophy. At a time and in a place (fifteenth-century Florence) where philosophy was open to forms of experimentation involving words and images, Poliziano was keen to defend the legacy of poetry, rhetoric and history within the tradition of philosophical inquiries, and more specifically, the role of fiction in shaping arguments and tools of analytical scrutiny. From an interpretative point of view, one of the guiding lines in my analysis will be the category known in contemporary philosophy as moral imagination, that is, the idea that the imagination has the ability to transcend the limitations of individual desire and create the conditions for a broader engagement with reality. It is a type of moral abstraction that allows ideals and values to become sufficiently general to be shared by communities (synchronically) and handed down by traditions (diachronically). It will be apparent how in Poliziano’s account fiction, understood as the narrative element invigorating rational argument, expands the scope of imaginable possibilities while acknowledging the role played by the many constraints of history (res) and persuasion (fides).Keywords: fiction, history, res, moral imagination, Homer, Horace, Angelo Poliziano, Renaissance philosophyPubDate: 2018-01-05DOI: 10.26754/ojs_arif/a.rif.201722471Issue No:Vol. 4, No. 2 (2018)

Authors:Ana Laura PuliafitoPages: 243 - 263Abstract: This paper analyses the role played by myths in Francesco Patrizi’s Dialoghi della retorica (1562). In the discussion of the tenets of classical rhetoric contained in the work, Patrizi aims to define both the matter and the form of the discipline through the analysis of the nature of language and the limits of human knowledge. Patrizi uses some stories where fiction and history are intertwined to provide a mythical explanation of the causes behind the first decay of human social, political and intellectual life. Therefore, the present contribution will focus on Patrizi’s approach to reforming language in its rhetorical dimension, and will determine what role is reserved for fiction in the Dialogues on Rhetoric. In other words, I will try to respond with Patrizi to the following question: What meaning can fiction offer when language is employed as a way of accessing truth'Keywords: Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, Rhetoric, Aristotle, Myth and History.PubDate: 2018-01-05DOI: 10.26754/ojs_arif/a.rif.201722475Issue No:Vol. 4, No. 2 (2018)

Authors:Eric McPhailPages: 265 - 276Abstract: This article proposes a comparison between the French Renaissance demonologist Jean Bodin and the fictional character Don Quijote. Like the hero of Cervantes’ novel, Bodin believes everything he reads. Consequently, Bodin makes his own discipline of demonology a species of romance that eagerly blurs the boundary of fact and fiction. This type of credulity can be usefully juxtaposed to Michel de Montaigne’s understanding of the imagination and to his more philosophical exploration of the realm of possibility.Keywords: Demonology, fiction, imagination, Jean Bodin, Cervantes, Montaigne.PubDate: 2018-01-05DOI: 10.26754/ojs_arif/a.rif.201722473Issue No:Vol. 4, No. 2 (2018)

Authors:Sandra PlastinaPages: 277 - 295Abstract: This article focuses on Lucrezia Marinella’s L’Enrico, ovvero Bisanzio acquistato (1635) and Moderata Fonte’s Tredici canti del Floridoro (1581). Marinella’s epic, or ‘heroic,’ poem belongs to a genre not well represented in women’s writings, while Fonte’s work is the first original chivalric poem written by a woman, an Italian woman who grappled with epic and chivalric romance. These genres were so elite and laborious that they discouraged all but the most enterprising writers of either sex. The female warriors of epic, the women’s aptitude for martial arts, and the increasing openness to female involvement in battle correspond to a shifting emphasis in warfare from physical force to mental agility and astuteness. No attempt will be made here at a comprehensive treatment; rather the focus of the article will be on the question of how women in this period responded to what might be broadly termed the gender politics of chivalric works.Keywords: Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Gender roles, Gender attitudes, Fiction, Epic, force (physical and mental)PubDate: 2018-01-05DOI: 10.26754/ojs_arif/a.rif.201722476Issue No:Vol. 4, No. 2 (2018)

Authors:Antonio Bernat Vistarini, John T. CullPages: 297 - 320Abstract: This study explores the function of several types of narrative fiction utilized by three of the most distinguished political emblematists of the Hispanic Baroque: Diego Saavedra Fajardo, Andrés Mendo (who borrows liberally from the work of Solórzano Pereira) and the expressly anti-Machiavellian works of Francisco Garau. We consider the rationale behind choosing the emblem as a vehicle to express Counter-reformation political thought and we trace an evolution that leads to one of the books of Garau, which reveals itself to be a highly original work that propagates traditional rhetorical procedures and at the same time it conceals a radical skepticism affecting both the form and content of the work.Keywords: Emblems, Spanish Political Literature, Golden Age Literature, Narrative FictionPubDate: 2018-01-05DOI: 10.26754/ojs_arif/a.rif.201722474Issue No:Vol. 4, No. 2 (2018)